Journal articles on the topic 'Cambodia – Politics and government – 1975-1979'

The scale of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is difficult to deal with (over one million Cambodians lost their lives), but efforts are now underway to bring at least some of the surviving leaders of the regime to justice. This essay explores the reasons for delay of the trials, citing:The absence of international precedents prior to the 1990s;The show trial of two Khmer Rouge leaders in 1979; andThe obstacles to a trial arising from geopolitical considerations in the 1980s (in which some powers now calling for a trial, including the United States, were effectively allied with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh).In the 1990s, following the Paris Peace Accords and the brief UN protectorate over Cambodia, demands for a trial came from overseas and from Cambodian human rights groups. The Cambodian regime considered the show trials of 1979 sufficient, however, and in 1998 Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen urged his compatriots to “dig a hole and bury the past.” Eager to regain foreign support for his regime after several brutal incidents in which political opponents were killed, Hun Sen has more recently agreed to limited international participation in a trial. A procedure targeting a few Khmer Rouge leaders seems likely in 2000, but Cambodian government control of the proceedings means that nothing like a truth commission or a wide-ranging inquiry will result.

AbstractThe Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was established in 2004 through an agreement between the United Nations (UN) and the Cambodian government, as a means to address the crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The ECCC is one in a row of international judicial institutions set up in response to gross violations of human rights, known as 'hybrid' courts, encompassing both national and international elements in their structure, composition and jurisdiction. Hybrid courts, allowing for a higher degree of participation by national actors, are expected to be better placed to give long-lasting effects in the societies in which mass atrocities have taken place. This article examines that claim with regard to the ECCC, and explores the value added by participation by various national actors in the judicial proceedings. After giving an overview of international standards of judicial independence, it provides an analysis of concerns that may be raised with regard to the judicial independence of the ECCC. This article argues that some aspects of national ownership may be promoted at the cost of lowering international standards of justice, and may cause an overall lack of ownership or accountability of the proceedings.

After a two-year tug-of-war between the US, the UN, and Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government, supported by massive international intervention, brought some of those accused of committing Khmer Rouge atrocities to trial before an independent court. The atrocities, which verged on genocide, were perpetrated between 1975 and 1979. The plan was to create a special tribunal consisting of both indigenous and foreign judges to try the perpetrators. Newspapers from 2002 reported that the first indictment would be issued some time during that year. As we know today, this proved to be a rosily optimistic prediction.

Determinants of Reconciliation in Cambodia Forty years after Cambodian genocide the reconciliation is still in early stage. Despite such long time there was almost nothing done, especially in 20th century, to make that process happened. The article discusses the determinants, reasons and factors that had impact on reconciliation. Determinants can be divided into different categories. First of all the socio-historical background. Circumstances in which Khmer Rouge come to power, their revolutionary approach to economy, implemented reforms, use of children, displacements of people and categorization of citizens had great impact on post-1979 Cambodia. Another determinant is a political one. Policy of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia rulers stunted the reconciliation. There reason of such actions are multidimensional but the most important one is provenance of People’s Republic of Kampuchea leaders. The most important figures in Cambodia politics are ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers, accused by some of taking a part in genocide. What’s even more confusing, the most powerful opposition party in 1980s were perpetrators themselves and their allies. Even after signing Paris Peace Accords in 1991 until early 2000s there was no will to punish Khmer Rouge officials responsible for genocide. The Cambodian culture of silence, the third determinant, only exacerbates a difficult situation. Cambodians rarely speak about atrocities and harsh past because of fear, shame or trauma. Even in school textbooks until 2009 there was almost nothing said about tragic events which happened between 1975 and 1979. History of Democratic Kampuchea still affects the Cambodian society. Despite sentencing few Khmer Rouge officials in 2010s, there’s still lot to be done also on state-level. Reconciliation and coming back to the state of balance is the main challenge for Cambodia in the nearest future, crucially important to social and political life of this nation.

<p><em>Conflict often occurs when two or more interests are in contradiction and no one wants to concede. We know a variety of conflicts today, from the conflict preexisting since a long time ago such as intertribal conflict to more modern conflict such as a state’s tapping over another. The way of resolving conflict is also varying according to the types of conflict, big conflict such as interstate conflict or the one attracting the world’s attention, using more complex resolution and usually using the third party. Therefore, a special organization will be founded to solve a conflict. One of organizations created to solve a conflict is the Extraordinary Chambers in The Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) aiming to try the war criminals during Khmer Rouge humanity crime incidence in 1975-1979. Humanity crime occurring in Cambodia is one of largest humanity tragedies in modern era post 2^nd World War. This ECCC was founded because at that time Cambodia’s National Justice Institution could not try the perpetrator of humanity crime. Cambodian government along with UN then agreed to found a justice institution specifically aiming to deal with and to resolve Khmer Rouge case.</em></p>

Dragged reluctantly into the debate over Khmer Rouge accountability, the United Nations Secretariat has spent the last five years attempting to find a mutually acceptable judicial structure to try the leaders of the former government of Cambodia for international crimes committed between 1975 and 1979.In response to a request for aid from the Cambodian government in June 1997, the UN originally came down in favour of establishing a thirdad hocInternational Criminal Tribunal. Taking that proposal as a starting point, this paper documents the series of events leading the Organisation towards unwilling participation in potentially unjust domestic trials after Cambodia's refusal of the UN proposal. Each time the negotiations seemed to have broken down, the UN and Cambodia came under pressure from certain Member States to return to the negotiating table. Beset with its responsibility in supporting the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the UN compromised successively concerning the nature of the court (part 3) and its structure (part 4). A consensus finally seemed to have been reached in July 2000, when a UN negotiating team left Phnom Penh with a draft Memorandum of Understanding concerning ‘significant international co-operation’ in trials before ‘Extraordinary Chambers’ of the Cambodian courts (the ‘draft MOU’). However, the law finally promulgated on 10 August 2001 in order to set up these Chambers (the ‘Tribunal Law’) was not entirely consistent with the terms of the draft MOU, the exact legal status of which then became a bone of contention (part 5).

José Eduardo do Santos (JES), President of Angola, has been in charge since 1979, and is also the commander-in-chief of the FAA (Angola Armed Forces) and president of the MPLA, (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, in charge of the country’s politics since 1975).Since 2011, inspired by the rise of the Arab Spring, some groups started group debates, trying to finding pacific ways to raise awareness to the authoritarian regime they were living. Consequently, the government dealt with them with extreme violence, using them as object-example of fear to whoever tried to oppose. In 2015, a group of 17 activists was arrested for reading a book in an open reunion, and accused of conspiring against JES’ government. One of the front men of this movement just spoke at the European Parliament in January 2017, though a month later he was suffering police violence again when joining a new manifestation in Luanda. In April 2017, a similar case happened to another group of activists, and the 7 remain in jail in poor health conditions.

After spending a decade as an independent trucker hauling milk, watermelons, and paper across the United States, Mike Parkhurst sold his tractor-trailer in 1961 and used the proceeds to establish Overdrive magazine—the “Voice of the American Trucker.” Believing “truckers were ready for a magazine that would pull no punches,” Parkhurst launched a decades-long editorial assault on transportation regulations that he believed bound American enterprise in the chains of corporate control, government malfeasance, and brutish boss unionism. By the mid-1970s, Parkhurst became one of the nation's most outspoken advocates of transportation deregulation. As he told a reporter for Time in 1975, he hoped “to wake the truckers up to the fact that they're slaves to a monopoly”—a monopoly on freight transportation maintained by corporate trucking firms, abetted by the Teamsters Union, and sanctioned by corrupt government officials. In the summer of 1979, Parkhurst helped to orchestrate a nationwide strike by tens of thousands of independent truckers, in which drivers demanded, according to William Scheffer of the Overdrive-sponsored Independent Truckers Association, “the dismantling of a giant Federal bureaucracy that has grown to govern the trucking industry since the mid-1930's.”

Thailand's role in the Cold War is often seen through the prism of its support for U.S. operations during the Vietnam War. Yet after the departure of U.S. troops from Thai territory in 1976, the Thai government was largely left to fend for itself. Soon after the U.S. withdrawal, a serious crisis arose for Thailand: Vietnam's invasion and occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1989. Scholars have examined Thailand's diplomacy during this period but have devoted scant attention to Thailand's defense planning. This article considers both the strategic and the operational dimensions of that planning. The analysis shows that Thailand's strategic culture can explain its adroit strategic-level decision-making and its ability to use its relationships with China, the United States, and the Association of South East Asian Nations to make the costs of Vietnam's occupation unsustainably high. In contrast, Thai military organizational culture can help explain why, at the operational level, Thailand's defense planning was compromised by unclear and incoherent military doctrine, materiel procurement, preparedness planning, and resource allocation.

Since the Cambodian refugee emergency of 1979, refugee emergencies continue to be a global problem. Health care workers returning from the Cambodian emergency relief presented the need for improved predeparture training and orientation to the Second World Congress on Emergency and Disaster Medicine in Pittsburgh and elsewhere (1,2). The special training needs of health professionals working in such emergencies have come to the attention of the National Council for International Health in the US (NCIH) whose role is to increase US effectiveness in international health in developing countries (3,4,5). NCIH, established in 1971, is a private non-profit organization. Membership includes individuals, private and voluntary organizations, health and medical associations, universities, governmental agencies, foundations, corporations and consulting firms.Worldwide today, more than 10 mill. refugees have been forced to leave their homelands because of political and civil disturbances, war, famine, earthquakes, floods and other disasters. Host governments are often unable to deal with these situations and rely on international relief to provide for the various physical, humanitarian and other needs of these victims.Providing health care is a complex process that takes place in phases within political, economic, social and cultural constraints that are unfamiliar to health care workers without prior experience or special training. Unfortunately training to meet these emergencies is either non-existent or consists of brief predeparture sessions. Only a fraction of those with prior experience are available at short notice. In Thailand, for example, organizations were forced to recruit medical professionals who were inexperienced in refugee relief.

ABSTRACT Objective: to describe the circumstances in which was gave the proposal for recasting and operationalization of the National Health Policy, in the period from 1973 to 1979. Methodology: historical and social study, based on documentary analysis. Results: in reviewing the circumstances in which was gave the proposal for recasting and operationalization of the National Health Policy in the 1970s, we found that it was striking inequality that existed in the level of health of people, caused by factors constraints of the most varied and characterized so peculiar to each company, led the government, the international organizations and world community had the primary targets in its policies. It was in that moment that the federal government, through Law No. 6229/1975, organized the National Health System. So, in the 1970s, it was started the discussions about the politics of the extension of coverage, which centered in the primary care basic point of departure that can be achieved better care coverage to people, to try to reach adequate levels of health. Conclusion: as actors participants of the constitution of the new health system, called "network", the nurses, in order to understand the social reality and to articulate in socioeconomic structure, they needed to pass through a process with significant changes in their academic training, and consequently, in the care. Descriptors: nursing; public health; health policies.RESUMOObjetivo: descrever as circunstâncias em que se deu a proposta de reformulação e operacionalização da Política Nacional de Saúde, no período de 1973 a 1979. Metodologia: estudo histórico-social, embasado na análise documental. Resultados: ao analisarmos as circunstâncias em que se deu a proposta de reformulação e operacionalização da Política Nacional de Saúde, na década de 1970, encontramos que, era marcante a desigualdade que existia no nível de saúde dos povos, provocada por fatores condicionantes dos mais variados e caracterizada de modo peculiar em cada sociedade, o que fez com que o governo, as organizações internacionais e a comunidade mundial tivessem como preocupação primordial metas em suas políticas de saúde. Foi nesse momento que o governo federal, por meio da Lei nº 6229/1975, estruturou o Sistema Nacional de Saúde. A partir daí, nos anos de 1970, começaram as discussões acerca das políticas de extensão de cobertura, que centravam, na assistência primária o ponto básico de partida para que fosse alcançada melhor assistência de cobertura às populações, a fim de que atingisse níveis adequados de saúde. Conclusão: como atores participantes da constituição do novo sistema de saúde, denominado “rede”, as enfermeiras, no intuito de apreender a realidade social e se articular na estrutura socioeconômica, necessitavam passar por um processo de mudanças significativas em sua formação acadêmica, e conseqüentemente, assistencial. Descritores: enfermagem; saúde pública; políticas de saúde.RESUMENObjetivo: describir las circunstancias en que se dio a la propuesta de la refundición y la puesta en marcha de la Política Nacional de Salud, en el período comprendido entre 1973 a 1979. Metodologia: estudio histórico y social sobre la base de análisis documental. Resultados: al examinar las circunstancias en que se dio a la propuesta de la refundición y la puesta en marcha de la Política Nacional de Salud en el decenio de 1970, encontramos que era notable la desigualdad que existía en el nivel de salud de las personas, causados por factores de las limitaciones de las más variadas y caracterizado por lo peculiar de cada una de las empresas, llevó al gobierno, las organizaciones internacionales y la comunidad mundial son los principales objetivos en sus políticas. Fue entonces que el gobierno federal, a través de la Ley N º 6229/1975, organizado el Consejo Nacional de Salud. A partir desde alli, en el decenio de 1970, inició los debates sobre la política de la ampliación de la cobertura, que se centró en la atención primaria punto básico de partida que se puede lograr una mejor cobertura de atención a las personas a fin de que alcance niveles adecuados de salud. Conclusión: como los actores participantes de la constitución del nuevo sistema de salud, denominado red, las enfermeras, a fin de comprender la realidad social y se articulan en la estructura socioeconómica, es necesario pasar por un proceso de importantes cambios en su formación académica y, en consecuencia, asistencial. Descriptores: enfermería; salud pública; politicas de salud.

The drive to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced federal budgets has been a defining issue of American politics in the final decade of the twentieth century. Supporters of this measure deemed it the only way to break the cycle of huge deficits that inflated the national debt to almost unmanageable proportions in recent years. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 only the Senate's narrow failure to deliver the requisite two-thirds majority – latterly by a single vote – prevented Congress proposing an amendment for ratification by the states. Nevertheless the balanced-budget amendment campaign is not a product of the deficit-conscious 1990s. It originated in the 1970s as a movement by the states to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Between 1975 and 1979 thirty states petitioned Congress for a convention to write a balanced-budget amendment. The convention method of constitutional reform had lain unused since the Founding Fathers devised it as an alternative to congressional initiative, but the support of only four more states would have provided the two-thirds majority needed for its implementation. The states' campaign stalled at this juncture in the face of opposition from the Carter administration and congressional Democrats. By then, however, it had done much to popularize the balanced-budget amendment and make it part of the nation's political agenda.This article seeks to analyze the development of the balanced-budget amendment constitutional convention campaign and to assess its historical significance. Aside from its relevance to today's fiscal politics, the movement merits attention as an important episode in the history of the 1970s, an era when economic problems at home and defeat abroad underlined the limits of America's prosperity and power. In this troubled time, popular confidence in the nation's political leaders underwent marked decline. The Watergate scandal, failure in Vietnam and economic stagflation created doubts about their trustworthiness and competence to deal with America's problems. The budget revolt by the states was a manifestation of this anti-Washington mood. In style as well as substance, the campaign challenged conventional politics: it manifested distrust in elected leaders to manage public finances without constitutional restraint and sought to bypass establishment control of the orthodox forms of politics through adoption of an untested process of constitutional change. In many respects the drive for a balanced-budget amendment convention was an expression of the same populist impulse that was the mainspring of Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976. The former Georgia governor's status as a political outsider untainted by previous connection with Washington had been his greatest electoral asset, but in office this man-of-the-people aligned himself with the nation's political establishment against the convention campaign. Analysis of Carter's response to this movement casts light on the ambiguity and complexity of his presidential politics.

On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. In a very real sense, JJ [was] a deconditioning agent” (Inglis 375-6). While Double Jay drew deeply from mainstream culture, its skilful and playful manipulation of this culture enabled it to both reflect and incite youth-based counterculture in Australia in the 1970s. References Australian Broadcasting Control Board. Development of National Broadcasting and Television Services. ABCB: Sydney, 1976. Batzell, E.D. “Counter-Culture.” Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. Eds. Williams Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 116-119. Bloodworth, John David. “Communication in the Youth Counterculture: Music as Expression.” Central States Speech Journal 26.4 (1975): 304-309. Bowman, David. “Radical Giant of Australian Broadcasting: Allan Ashbolt, Lion of the ABC, 1921-2005.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 June 2005. 15 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/news/Obituaries/Radical-giant-of-Australian-broadcasting/2005/06/14/1118645805607.html›. Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle. Eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s New York: Taylor and Francis, 2002. Brockman, Holger. Personal interview. 8 December 2013. Cheney, Roz. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Chipp, Don, and John Larkin. Don Chipp: The Third Man. Adelaide: Rigby, 2008. Cunningham, Frank. Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Davis, Fred. On Youth Subcultures: The Hippie Variant. New York: General Learning Press, 1971. Davis, Glyn. "Government Decision‐Making and the ABC: The 2JJ Case." Politics 19.2 (1984): 34-42. Dawson, Jonathan. "JJJ: Radical Radio?." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 6.1 (1992): 37-44. Department of the Media. Submission by the Department of the Media to the Independent Inquiry into Frequency Modulation Broadcasting. Sydney: Australian Government Publishers, 1974. Desmond, John, Pierre McDonagh, and Stephanie O'Donohoe. “Counter-Culture and Consumer Society.” Consumption Markets & Culture 4.3 (2000): 241-279. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Elder, Bruce. Sound Experiment. Unpublished manuscript, 1988. Australian National Commission for UNESCO. Extract from Seminar on Entertainment and Society, Report on Research Project. 1976. Frolows, Arnold. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gerster, Robin, and Jan Bassett. Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991. Griffen-Foley, Bridget. Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. Harding, Richard. Outside Interference: The Politics of Australian Broadcasting. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1979. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia”. Screening the Past 35 (2012). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/12/the-sydney-and-melbourne-film-festivals-and-the-liberalisation-of-film-censorship-in-australia/›. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “Is Happiness Festival-Shaped Any Longer? The Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals and the Growth of Australian Film Culture 1973-1977”. Screening the Past 38 (2013). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/‘is-happiness-festival-shaped-any-longer’-the-melbourne-and-sydney-film-festivals-and-the-growth-of-australian-film-culture-1973-1977/›. Horne, Donald. Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Inglis, Ken. This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983. Langley, Greg. A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Eds. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York: Villard, 2007. ix-xiv. Leech, Kenneth. Youthquake: The Growth of a Counter-Culture through Two Decades. London: Sheldon Press, 1973. Martin, J., and C. Siehl. "Organizational Culture and Counterculture: An Uneasy Symbiosis. Organizational Dynamics, 12.2 (1983): 52-64. Martin, Peter. Personal interview. 10 July 2014. Matchett, Stuart. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. McClelland, Douglas. “The Arts and Media.” Towards a New Australia under a Labor Government. Ed. John McLaren. Victoria: Cheshire Publishing, 1972. McClelland, Douglas. Personal interview. 25 August 2010. Milesago. “Double Jay: The First Year”. n.d. 8 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/radio/2jj.htm›. Milesago. “Part 5: 1971-72 - Sundown and 'Archie & Jughead's”. n.d. Keith Glass – A Life in Music. 12 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/Features/keithglass5.htm›. Nicklin, Lenore. “Rock (without the Roll) around the Clock.” Sydney Morning Herald 18 Jan. 1975: 9. Robinson, Ted. Personal interview. 11 December 2013. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Semmler, Clement. The ABC - Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1981. Senate Standing Committee on Education, Science and the Arts and Jim McClelland. Second Progress Report on the Reference, All Aspects of Television and Broadcasting, Including Australian Content of Television Programmes. Canberra: Australian Senate, 1973. Thompson, Craig J., and Gokcen Coskuner‐Balli. "Countervailing Market Responses to Corporate Co‐optation and the Ideological Recruitment of Consumption Communities." Journal of Consumer Research 34.2 (2007): 135-152. Thoms, Albie. “The Australian Avant-garde.” An Australian Film Reader. Eds. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan. Sydney: Currency Press, 1985. 279–280. Vercoe, Colin. Personal interview. 11 Feb. 2014. Walker, Keith. Personal interview. 11 July 2013. Webb, Marius. Personal interview. 5 Feb. 2013. Whiteley, Sheila. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Wiltshire, Kenneth, and Charles Stokes. Government Regulation and the Electronic Commercial Media. Monograph M43. Melbourne: Committee for Economic Development of Australia, 1976. Winter, Chris. Personal interview. 16 Mar. 2013.

Proponents of the free culture movement argue that contemporary, “over-zealous” copyright laws have an adverse affect on the freedoms of consumers and creators to make use of copyrighted materials. Lessig, McLeod, Vaidhyanathan, Demers, and Coombe, to name but a few, detail instances where creativity and consumer use have been hindered by copyright laws. The “intellectual land-grab” (Boyle, “Politics” 94), instigated by the increasing value of intangibles in the information age, has forced copyright owners to seek maximal protection for copyrighted materials. A propertarian approach seeks to imbue copyrighted materials with the same inalienable rights as real property, yet copyright is not a property right, because “the copyright owner … holds no ordinary chattel” (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 216 [1985]). A fundamental difference resides in the exclusivity of use: “If you eat my apple, then I cannot” but “if you “take” my idea, I still have it. If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it. An unavoidable feature of intellectual property is that its consumption is non-rivalrous” (Lessig, Code 131). It is, as James Boyle notes, “different” to real property (Shamans 174). Vaidhyanathan observes, “copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (11). This paper explores the ways in which “property talk” has infiltrated copyright discourse and endangered the utility of the law in fostering free and diverse forms of creative expression. The possessiveness and exclusion that accompany “property talk” are difficult to reconcile with the utilitarian foundations of copyright. Transformative uses of copyrighted materials such as mashing, sampling and appropriative art are incompatible with a propertarian approach, subjecting freedom of creativity to arbitary licensing fees that often extend beyond the budget of creators (Collins). “Property talk” risks making transformative works an elitist form of creativity, available only to those with the financial resources necessary to meet the demands for licences. There is a wealth of decisions throughout American and English case law that sustain Vaidhyanathan’s argument (see for example, Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953; Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994].). As Lemley states, however, “Congress, the courts and commentators increasingly treat intellectual property as simply a species of real property rather than as a unique form of legal protection designed to deal with public goods problems” (1-2). Although section 106 of the Copyright Act 1976 grants exclusive rights, sections 107 to 112 provide freedoms beyond the control of the copyright owner, undermining the exclusivity of s.106. Australian law similarly grants exceptions to the exclusive rights granted in section 31. Exclusivity was a principal objective of the eighteenth century Stationers’ argument for a literary property right. Sir William Blackstone, largely responsible for many Anglo-American concepts concerning the construction of property law, defined property in absolutist terms as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the whole universe” (2). On the topic of reprints he staunchly argued an author “has clearly a right to dispose of that identical work as he pleases, and any attempt to take it from him, or vary the disposition he has made of it, is an invasion of his right of property” (405-6). Blackstonian copyright advanced an exclusive and perpetual property right. Blackstone’s interpretation of Lockean property theory argued for a copyright that extended beyond the author’s expression and encompassed the very “style” and “sentiments” held therein. (Tonson v. Collins [1760] 96 ER 189.) According to Locke, every Man has a Property in his own Person . . . The Labour of his Body and the Work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (287-8) Blackstone’s inventive interpretation of Locke “analogised ideas, thoughts, and opinions with tangible objects to which title may be taken by occupancy under English common law” (Travis 783). Locke’s labour theory, however, is not easily applied to intangibles because occupancy or use is non-rivalrous. The appropriate extent of an author’s proprietary right in a work led Locke himself to a philosophical impasse (Bowrey 324). Although Blackstonian copyright was suppressed by the House of Lords in the eighteenth century (Donaldson v. Becket [1774] 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953) and by the Supreme Court sixty years later (Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]), it has never wholly vacated copyright discourse. “Property talk” is undesirable in copyright discourse because it implicates totalitarian notions such as exclusion and inalienable private rights of ownership with no room for freedom of creativity or to use copyrighted materials for non-piracy related purposes. The notion that intellectual property is a species of property akin with real property is circulated by media companies seeking greater control over copyrighted materials, but the extent to which “property talk” has been adopted by the courts and scholars is troubling. Lemley (3-5) and Bell speculate whether the term “intellectual property” carries any responsibility for the propertisation of intangibles. A survey of federal court decisions between 1943 and 2003 reveals an exponential increase in the usage of the term. As noted by Samuelson (398) and Cohen (379), within the spheres of industry, culture, law, and politics the word “property” implies a broader scope of rights than those associated with a grant of limited monopoly. Music United claims “unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD”. James Brown argues sampling from his records is tantamount to theft: “Anything they take off my record is mine . . . Can I take a button off your shirt and put it on mine? Can I take a toenail off your foot – is that all right with you?” (Miller 1). Equating unauthorised copying with theft seeks to socially demonise activities occurring outside of the permission culture currently being fostered by inventive interpretations of the law. Increasing propagation of copyright as the personal property of the creator and/or copyright owner is instrumental in efforts to secure further legislative or judicial protection: Since 1909, courts and corporations have exploited public concern for rewarding established authors by steadily limiting the rights of readers, consumers, and emerging artists. All along, the author was deployed as a straw man in the debate. The unrewarded authorial genius was used as a rhetorical distraction that appealed to the American romantic individualism. (Vaidhyanathan 11) The “unrewarded authorial genius” was certainly tactically deployed in the eighteenth century in order to generate sympathy in pleas for further protection (Feather 71). Supporting the RIAA, artists including Britney Spears ask “Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It’s the same thing – people going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music”. The presence of a notable celebrity claiming file-sharing is equivalent to stealing their personal property is a more publicly acceptable spin on the major labels’ attempts to maintain a monopoly over music distribution. In 1997, Congress enacted the No Electronic Theft Act which extended copyright protection into the digital realm and introduced stricter penalties for electronic reproduction. The use of “theft” in the title clearly aligns the statute with a propertarian portrayal of intangibles. Most movie fans will have witnessed anti-piracy propaganda in the cinema and on DVDs. Analogies between stealing a bag and downloading movies blur fundamental distinctions in the rivalrous/non-rivalrous nature of tangibles and intangibles (Lessig Code, 131). Of critical significance is the infiltration of “property talk” into the courtrooms. In 1990 Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote: Patents give a right to exclude, just as the law of trespass does with real property … Old rhetoric about intellectual property equating to monopoly seemed to have vanished, replaced by a recognition that a right to exclude in intellectual property is no different in principle from the right to exclude in physical property … Except in the rarest case, we should treat intellectual and physical property identically in the law – which is where the broader currents are taking us. (109, 112, 118) Although Easterbrook refers to patents, his endorsement of “property talk” is cause for concern given the similarity with which patents and copyrights have been historically treated (Ou 41). In Grand Upright v. Warner Bros. Judge Kevin Duffy commenced his judgment with the admonishment “Thou shalt not steal”. Similarly, in Jarvis v. A&M Records the court stated “there can be no more brazen stealing of music than digital sampling”. This move towards a propertarian approach is misguided. It runs contrary to the utilitarian principles underpinning copyright ideology and marginalises freedoms protected by the fair use doctrine, hence Justice Blackman’s warning that “interference with copyright does not easily equate with” interference with real property (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 216 [1985]). The framing of copyright in terms of real property privileges private monopoly over, and to the detriment of, the public interest in free and diverse creativity as well as freedoms of personal use. It is paramount that when dealing with copyright cases, the courts remain aware that their decisions involve not pure economic regulation, but regulation of expression, and what may count as rational where economic regulation is at issue is not necessarily rational where we focus on expression – in a Nation constitutionally dedicated to the free dissemination of speech, information, learning and culture. (Eldred v. Ashcroft 537 US 186 [2003] [J. Breyer dissenting]). Copyright is the prize in a contest of property vs. policy. As Justice Blackman observed, an infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 217-218 [1985]). Copyright policy places a great deal of control and cultural determinism in the hands of the creative industries. Without balance, oppressive monopolies form on the back of rights granted for the welfare of society in general. If a society wants to be independent and rich in diverse forms of cultural production and free expression, then the courts cannot continue to apply the law from within a propertarian paradigm. The question of whether culture should be determined by control or freedom in the interests of a free society is one that rapidly requires close attention – “it’s no longer a philosophical question but a practical one”. References Bayat, Asef. “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People.’” Third World Quarterly 18.1 (1997): 53-72. Bell, T. W. “Author’s Welfare: Copyright as a Statutory Mechanism for Redistributing Rights.” Brooklyn Law Review 69 (2003): 229. Blackstone, W. Commentaries on the Laws of England: Volume II. New York: Garland Publishing, 1978. (Reprint of 1783 edition.) Boyle, J. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Boyle, J. “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87. Bowrey, K. “Who’s Writing Copyright’s History?” European Intellectual Property Review 18.6 (1996): 322. Cohen, J. “Overcoming Property: Does Copyright Trump Privacy?” University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 375 (2002). Collins, S. “Good Copy, Bad Copy.” (2005) M/C Journal 8.3 (2006). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php>. Coombe, R. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Demers, J. Steal This Music. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 2006. Easterbrook, F. H. “Intellectual Property Is Still Property.” (1990) Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13 (1990): 108. Feather, J. Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain. London: Mansell, 1994. Lemley, M. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031. Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Lessing, L. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001. Lessig, L. Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988. McLeod, K. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An Interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free (2002). 14 June 2006 http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html>. McLeod, K. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.” Popular Music & Society 28 (2005): 79. McLeod, K. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books, 2005. Miller, M.W. “Creativity Furor: High-Tech Alteration of Sights and Sounds Divides the Art World.” Wall Street Journal (1987): 1. Ou, T. “From Wheaton v. Peters to Eldred v. Reno: An Originalist Interpretation of the Copyright Clause.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society (2000). 14 June 2006 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/cyber/OuEldred.pdf>. Samuelson, P. “Information as Property: Do Ruckelshaus and Carpenter Signal a Changing Direction in Intellectual Property Law?” Catholic University Law Review 38 (1989): 365. Travis, H. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): 777. Vaidhyanathan, S. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York UP, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. (Sep. 2006) "‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php>.

Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Bennett, Jane. “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.” Public Culture 17.3 (2005): 445-65.Castells, Manuel. “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication, Networks, and Global Governance.” ANNALS, AAPSS 616 (2008): 78-93.Crosby, Alexandra, Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic, and Ilaria Vanni. “Mapping Hybrid Design Participation in Sydney.” Proceedings of the Arte-Polis 5th International Conference – Reflections on Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place. Bandung, 2014.Grayson, Russ, and Steve Payne. “Tasmanian Roots.” New Internationalist 402 (2007): 10–11.Grayson, Russ. “The Permaculture Papers 2: The Dawn.” PacificEdge 2010. 6 Oct. 2014 ‹http://pacific-edge.info/2010/10/the-permaculture-papers-2-the-dawn›.Holmgren, David. “About Permaculture.” Holmgren Design, Permaculture Vision and Innovation. 2014.Julier, Guy. “From Design Culture to Design Activism.” Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 215-236.Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. 141-158. Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications plus More than a Few Complications.” Philosophia, 25.3 (1996): 47-64.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/089.html›.Levin, Simon A. The Princeton Guide to Ecology. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2009Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto, eds. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. Vol. 17. Berghahn Books, 2013.Madge, Pauline. “Ecological Design: A New Critique.” Design Issues 13.2 (1997): 44-54.Mayer, Margit. “Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1 (2006): 202–206.Markussen, Thomas. “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics.” Design Issues 29.1 (2013): 38-50.McGregor, Craig. “What Counter-Culture?” Meanjin Quarterly 34.1 (1975).McGregor, Craig. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Meanjin Quarterly 30.2 (1971): 176-179.McKay, G. “DiY Culture: Notes Toward an Intro.” In G. McKay, ed., DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, London: Verso, 1988. 1-53.Metcalf, William J. “A Classification of Alternative Lifestyle Groups.” Journal of Sociology 20.66 (1984): 66–80.Milkwood. “Frequently Asked Questions.” 30 Sep. 2014. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au/permaculture/faqs›.Mollison, Bill, and David Holmgren. Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements. Melbourne: Transworld Publishers, 1978.Musgrove, F. Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society. London: Methuen and Co., 1974.permacultureprinciples.com. 25 Nov. 2014.Pink, Sarah. Situating Everyday Life. London: Sage, 2012.Robinson, Shirleene. “1960s Counter-Culture in Australia: the Search for Personal Freedom.” In The 1960s in Australia: People, Power and Politics, eds. Shirleene Robinson and Julie Ustinoff. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.Scott-Cato. Molly. Environment and Economy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.Stickells, Lee. “‘And Everywhere Those Strange Polygonal Igloos’: Framing a History of Australian Countercultural Architecture.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 30: Open. Vol. 2. Eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach. Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013. 555-568.

In post-socialist China, gender norms are marked by rising divorce rates (Kleinman et al.), shifting attitudes towards sex (Farrer; Yan), and a growing commercialisation of sex (Zheng). These phenomena have been understood as indicative of market reforms unhinging past gender norms. In the socialist period, the radical politics of the time moulded women as gender neutral even as state policies emphasised their feminine roles in maintaining marital harmony and stability (Evans). These ideas around domesticity bear strong resemblance to pre-socialist understandings of womanhood and family that anchored Chinese society before the Communists took power in 1949. In this pre-socialist understanding, women were categorised into a hierarchy that defined their rights as wives, mothers, concubines, and servants (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). Women who transgressed these categories were regarded as potentially dangerous and powerful enough to break up families and shake the foundations of Chinese society (Ahern). This paper explores the extent to which understandings of Chinese femininity have been reconfigured in the context of China’s post-1979 development, particularly after the 2000s.The popular television dramas Chinese Style Divorce (2004, Divorce), Dwelling Narrowness (2009, Dwelling), and Divorce Lawyers (2014, Lawyers) are set against this socio-cultural backdrop. The production of these shows is regulated by the China State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), who has the power to grant or deny production and distribution permits. Post-production, the dramas are sold to state-owned television stations for distribution (Yu 36). Haiqing Yu summarises succinctly the state of Chinese media: “Chinese state manipulation and interference in the media market has seen the party-state media marketized but not weakened, media control decentralized but not reduced, and the media industry commercialized but not privatized” (42). Shot in one of the biggest cities in Shandong, Qingdao, Divorce focuses on Doctor Song Jianping and his schoolteacher wife Lin Xiaofeng and the conflicts between Song and Lin, who quits her job to become a stay-at-home mom after her husband secures a high-paying job in a foreign-invested hospital. Lin becomes paranoid and volatile, convinced that their divorced neighbour Xiao Li is having an affair with Song. Refusing to explain the situation, Song is willing to give her a divorce but fights over guardianship of their son. In the end, it is unconfirmed whether they reconcile or divorce. Divorce was recognised as TV Drama of the Year in 2004 and the two leads also won awards for their acting. Reruns of the show continue to air. According to Hui Faye Xiao, “It is reported that many college students viewed this TV show as a textbook on married life in urban settings” (118). Dwelling examines the issue of skyrocketing housing prices and the fates of the Guo sisters, Haizao and Haiping, who moved from rural China to the competitive economically advanced metropolis. Haiping is obsessed with buying an apartment while her younger sister becomes the mistress of a corrupt official, Song Siming. Both sisters receive favours from Song, which leads to Haiping’s success in purchasing a home. However, Haizao is less fortunate. She has a miscarriage and her uterus removed while Song dies in a car accident. Online responses from the audience praise Dwelling for its penetrating and realistic insights into the complex web of familial relationships navigated by Chinese people living in a China under transformation (Xiao, “Woju”). Dwelling was taken off the air when a SARFT official criticised the drama for violating state-endorsed “cultural standards” in its explicit discussions of sex and negative portrayals of government officials (Hung, “State” 156). However, the show continued to be streamed online and it has been viewed and downloaded more than 100 million times (Yu 34). In Lawyers, Luo Li and Chi Haidong are two competing divorce lawyers in Beijing who finally tie the knot. Chi was a happily married man before catching his wife with her lover. Newly divorced, he moves into the same apartment building as Luo and the drama focuses on a series of cases they handle, most of which involve extramarital affairs. Lawyers has been viewed more than 1.6 billion times online (v.qq.com) and received the China Huading award for “favourite television drama” in 2015. Although these dramas contain some conventional elements of domestic melodramas, such as extramarital affairs and domestic disputes, they differ from traditional Chinese television dramas because they do not focus on the common trope of fraught mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships.Centred on the politics of family ethics, these hugely popular dramas present the transformation in gender norms as a struggle between post-socialist and pre-socialist understandings of femininity. On the one hand, these dramas celebrate the emergence of a post-socialist femininity that is independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated, epitomising this new understanding of womanhood in the figures of single women and mistresses. On the other hand, the dramas portray these post-socialist women in perpetual conflict with wives and mothers who propound a pre-socialist form of femininity that is sexually conservative and defined by familial relationships, and is economically less viable in the market economy. Focusing on depictions of femininity in these dramas, this paper offers a comparative analysis into the extent to which gender norms have been reconfigured in post-socialist China. It approaches these television dramas as a pedagogical device (Brady) and pays particular attention to the ways through which different categories of women interrogated their rights as single women, mistresses, wives, and mothers. In doing so, it illuminates the politics through which a liberal post-socialist femininity unleashed by market transformation is controlled in order to protect the integrity of the family and maintain social order. Post-Socialist Femininity Unleashed: Single Women and Mistresses A woman’s identity is inextricably linked to her marital status in Chinese society. In pre-socialist China, women relied on men as providers and were expected to focus on contributing to her husband’s family (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). This pre-socialist positioning of women within the private realm of the family, though reinterpreted, continued to resonate in the socialist period when women were expected to fulfil marital obligations as wives and participate in the public domain as revolutionaries (Evans). While the pressure to marry has not disappeared in post-socialist China, as the derogatory term “leftover women” (single women over the age of 27) indicates, there are now more choices for single women living in metropolitan cities who are highly educated and financially independent. They can choose to remain single, get married, or become mistresses. Single women can be regarded as a threat to wives because the only thing holding them back from becoming mistresses is their morals. The 28-year-old “leftover woman” Luo Li (Lawyers) is presented as morally superior to single women who choose to become mistresses (Luo Meiyuan and Shi Jiang) and therefore deserving of a happy ending because she breaks up with her boss as soon as she discovers he is married. Luo Li quits to set up a law firm with her friend Tang Meiyu. Both women are beautiful, articulate, intelligent, and sexually liberated, symbolising unleashed post-socialist femininity. Part of the comic relief in Lawyers is the subplot of Luo’s mother trying to introduce her to “eligible” bachelors such as the “PhD man” (Episodes 20–21). Luo is unwilling to lower her standards to escape the stigma of being a “leftover woman” and she is rewarded for adhering to her ideals in the end when she convinces the marriage-phobic Chi Haidong to marry her after she rejects a marriage proposal from her newly divorced ex-lover. While Luo Li refuses to remain a mistress, many women do not subscribe to her worldview. Mistresses have existed throughout Chinese history in the form of concubines and courtesans. A wealthy and powerful man was expected to have concubines, who were usually from lower socio-economic backgrounds (Ebrey and Watson; Liu). Mistresses, now referred to as xiaosan, have become a heated topic in post-socialist China where they are regarded as having the power to destroy families by transgressing moral boundaries. Some argue that the phenomenon is a result of the market-driven economy where women who desire a financially stable life use their sexuality to seek rich married men who lust for younger mistresses as symbols of power. Ruth Y.Y. Hung characterises the xiaosan phenomenon as a “horrendous sex trade [that is] a marker of neoliberal market economies in the new PRC” (“Imagination” 100). A comparison of the three dramas reveals a transformation in the depiction of mistresses over the last decade. While Xiao Li (Divorce) is never “confirmed” as Song Jianping’s mistress, she flirts with him and crosses the boundaries of a professional relationship, posing a threat to the stability of Song’s family life. Although Haizao (Dwelling) is university-educated and has a stable, if low-paying job, she chooses to break up with her earnest caring fiancé to be the mistress of the middle-aged Song Siming who offers her material benefits in the form of “loans” she knows she will never be able to repay, a fancy apartment to live in, and other “gifts” such as dining at expensive restaurants and shopping at big malls. While the fresh-faced Haizao exhibits a physical transformation after becoming Song’s mistress, demonstrated through her newly permed hair coupled with an expensive red coat, mistresses in Lawyers do not change in this way. Dong Dahai’s mistress, the voluptuous Luo Meiyuan is already a successful career woman who flaunts her perfect makeup, long wavy hair, and body-hugging dresses (Episodes 12–26). She exudes sexual confidence but her relationship is not predicated on receiving financial favours in return for sexual ones. She tells Dong’s wife that the only “third person” in a relationship is the “unloved” one (Episode 15). Another mistress who challenges old ideas of the power dynamic of the rich man and financially reliant young woman is the divorced Shi Jiang, Tang Meiyu’s former classmate, who becomes the mistress of Tang’s husband (Cao Qiankun) without any moral qualms, even though she knows that her friend is pregnant with his child. A powerful businesswoman, Shi is the owner of a high-end bar that Cao frequents after losing his job. Unable to tell his wife the truth, he spends most days wandering around and is unable to resist Shi’s advances because she claims to have loved him since their university days and that she understands him. In this relationship, Shi has taken on the role traditionally assigned to men: she is the affluent powerful one who is able to manipulate the downtrodden unemployed man by “lending” him money in his time of need, offering him a job at her bar (Episode 17), and eventually finding him a new job through her connections (Episodes 23–24). When Cao leaves home after Tang finds out about the affair, Shi provides him with a place to stay (Episode 34). Because the viewers are positioned to root for Tang due to her role as the female lead’s best friend, Shi is immediately set up as one of the villains, although she is portrayed in a more sympathetic light after she reveals to Cao that she was forced to give up her son to her ex-husband in America (who cheated on her) in order to finalise her divorce (Episode 29).The portrayal of different mistresses in Lawyers signals a transformation in the representation of gender compared to Divorce and Dwelling, because the women are less naïve than Haizao, financially well-off because of their business acumen, and much more outspoken and determined to fight for what they want. On the surface these women are depicted as more liberated and free from gender hierarchies and sexual oppression. Hung describes xiaosan as “an active if constrained agent . . . whose new mode of life has become revealingly defensible and publicly acceptable in socioeconomic terms that reflect the moral changes that follow economic reforms” (“State” 166). However, the closure of these storylines suggest that although more complex reasons for becoming a mistress have been explored in the new drama, mistresses are still regarded as a threat to social stability and therefore punished, challenging Hung’s argument about the “acceptability” of mistresses in post-socialist China. Post-Socialist Femininity Restrained: Wives and MothersCountering these liberal forms of post-socialist femininity are portrayals of righteous wives and exemplary mothers. These depictions articulate a moral positioning grounded in pre-socialist and socialist understandings of a woman’s place in Chinese society. These portrayals of moral women check the transgressive powers of single women and mistresses with the potential to break families up. More importantly, they remind the audience of desired gender norms that retain the integrity of the family and anchor a society undergoing rapid transformation.The three dramas portray wives who are stridently righteous in their confrontations with women they perceive as a threat to their families. These women find moral justification for the violence they inflict on transgressors from cultural understandings of their rights as wives. Lin Xiaofeng (Divorce) repeatedly challenges Xiao Li to explain the “logic” underlying her actions when she discovers that Xiao accompanied Song Jianping to a wedding (Episode 14). The “logic” Lin refers to is a cultural understanding that it is her right as wife to accompany Song to public events and not Xiao’s. By transgressing this moral boundary, Xiao accords Lin the moral authority to cast doubt on her abilities as a doctor in a public confrontation. It also provides moral justification for Lin to slap Xiao when she suggests that Lin is an embarrassment to her husband, an argument that underscores Lin’s failure and challenges her moral authority as wife. Jiang Miaomiao (Dwelling) draws on similar cultural understandings when she appears at the apartment Haizao shares with Song Siming (Episode 33). Jiang positions herself in the traditional role of a wife as a household manager (Ebrey) whose responsibilities include paying Song’s mistresses. She puts Haizao into a subordinate position by arguing that since Haizao is less than a mistress and slightly better than a prostitute, she is not worth the money Song has given her. When Haizao refuses to return the money a tussle ensues, causing Haizao to have a miscarriage. Likewise, Miao Jinxiu (Lawyers) draws on similar cultural understandings of a wife’s position when she laments popular arguments that depict mistresses such as Luo Meiyuan as usurping the superior position of wives like herself who are less attractive and able to navigate the market economy. Miao describes these arguments as “inverting black into white” (Episode 19). She publicly humiliates Luo by throwing paint on her at a charity event (Episode 17) and covers Luo’s car with posters labelling Luo a “slut,” “prostitute,” and “shameless” (Episode 18). Miao succeeds in “winning” her husband back. The public violence Miao inflicts on Luo and her success in protecting her marriage are struggles to reinforce the boundaries defining the categories of wife and mistress as these limits become increasingly challenged in China. In contrast to the violent strategies that Lin, Jiang, and Miao adopt, Tang Meiyu resists Shi Jiang’s destructive powers by reminding her errant husband of the emotional warmth of their family. She asks him, “Do you still remember telling me what the nicest sound is at home?” For Cao, the best sounds are Tang’s laughter, their baby’s cries, the sound of the washing machine, and the flushing of their leaky toilet (Episode 43). The couple reconciles and even wins a lottery that cements their “happy ending.” By highlighting the warmth of their family, Tang reminds Cao of her rightful place as wife, restrains Shi from breaking up the couple, and protects the integrity of the family. It is by drawing on deeply entrenched cultural understandings of the rights of wives that these women find the moral authority to challenge, restrain, and control the transgressive powers of mistresses and single women. The dramas’ portrayals of mothers further reinforce the sense that there is a need to restrain liberal forms of post-socialist femininity embodied by errant daughters who transgress the moral boundaries of the family. Lin Xiaofeng’s mother (Divorce) assumes the role of the forgiving wife and mother. She not only forgives Lin’s father for having an affair but raises Lin, her husband’s love child, as her own (Episode 23). On her deathbed, she articulates the values underlying her acceptance of this transgression, namely that one needs to be “a little kinder, more tolerant, and a little muddleheaded” when dealing with matters of the family. Her forgiveness bears fruit in the form of the warm companionship and support she enjoys with Lin’s father. This sends a strong pedagogical message to the audience that it is possible for a marriage to remain intact if one is willing to forgive. In contrast, Haizao’s mother (Dwelling) adopts the role of the disciplinary mother. She attempts to beat Haizao with a coat hanger when she finds out that her daughter is pregnant with Song Siming’s child (Episode 31). She describes Haizao’s decision as “the wrong path” and is emphatic that abortion is the only way to right this wrong. She argues that abortion will allow her daughter to start life anew in a relationship she describes as “open and aboveboard,” which will culminate in marriage. When Haizao rejects her mother’s disciplining, her lover dies in a car accident and she has a miscarriage. She loses her ability to speak for two months after these double tragedies and pays the ultimate price, losing her reproductive abilities. Luo Li’s mother (Lawyers), Li Chunhua, extends this pedagogical approach by adopting the role of public counsellor as a talk show host. Li describes Luo’s profession as “wicked” because it focuses on separating the family (Episode 9). Instead, she promotes reconciliation as an alternative. She counsels couples to remain together by propounding traditional family values, such as the need for daughters-in-law to consider the filial obligations of sons when managing their relationship with their mothers-in-law (Episode 25). Her rising ratings and the effectiveness of her strategy in bringing estranged couples like Miao Jinxiu and Dong Dahai back together (Episode 26) challenges the transgressive powers of mistresses by preventing the separation of families. More importantly, as with Haizao’s and Lin’s mothers, the moral force of Li’s position and the alternatives to divorce that she suggests draw on pre-socialist and socialist understandings of family values that underscore the sanctity of marriage to the audience. By reminding errant daughters of deeply embedded cultural standards of what it means to be a woman in Chinese society, these mothers are moral exemplars who restrain the potentiality of daughters becoming mistresses. ConclusionMarket reforms have led to a transformation in understandings of womanhood in post-socialist China. Depictions of mistresses and single women as independent, economically successful, and sexually liberated underscores the emergence of liberal forms of post-socialist femininity. Although adept at navigating the new market economy, these types of post-socialist women threaten the integrity of the family and need to be controlled. Moral arguments articulated by wives and mothers restrain the potentially destructive powers of post-socialist womanhood by drawing on deeply embedded understandings of the rights of women shaped in pre-socialist China. It is by disciplining liberal forms of post-socialist femininity such that they fit back into deeply embedded gender hierarchies that social order is restored. By illuminating the moral politics undergirding relationships between women in post-socialist China, the dramas discussed underscore the continued significance of television as a pedagogical device through which desired gender norms are popularised. These portrayals of the struggles between liberal forms of post-socialist femininity and conservative pre-socialist understandings of womanhood as lived in everyday life serve to communicate the importance of protecting the integrity of the family and maintaining social stability in order for China to continue to pursue development. ReferencesAhern, Emily. “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women.” Women in Chinese Society. Eds. Margery Wolf et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975. 193–214. Brady, Anne-Marie. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. China Huading Award. “Top 100 TV Series Satisfaction Survey.” 9 Aug. 2015. Chinese Style Divorce. Writ. Wang Hailing. Dir. Shen Yan. Beijing Jindun Xintong Film & Television Culture, 2004. Divorce Lawyers. Writ. Chen Tong. Dir. Yang Wenjun. JSTV, 2014. Dwelling Narrowness. Writ. Liu Liu, Teng Huatao, Cao Dun. Dir. Teng Huatao. Shanghai Media Group, 2009. Ebrey, Patricia. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Ebrey, Patricia, and Rubie Watson, eds. Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Evans, Harriet. Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality since 1949. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Farrer, James. Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Hung, Ruth Y.Y. “The State and the Market: Chinese TV Serials and the Case of Woju (Dwelling Narrowness).” boundary 2 38.2 (2011): 155–187. ———. “Imagination in the Box: Woju’s Realism and the Representation of Xiaosan.” Television, Sex and Society: Analyzing Contemporary Representations. Eds. Basil Glynn et al. New York: Continuum, 2012. 89–105. Kleinman, Arthur, et al. “Introduction: Remaking the Moral Person in a New China.” Deep China: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Eds. Arthur Kleinman et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. 1–35.Liu, Jieyu. “Gender and Sexuality.” Understanding Chinese Society. 2nd ed. Ed. Xiaowei Zang. London: Routledge, 2016. 53–66. Wolf, Margery, and Roxane Witke, eds. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975. Xiao, Fuxing. “Woju Is a Sting Aimed at Reality.” ChinaNews.com.cn, 19 Nov. 2009. Xiao, Hui Faye. Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2014. Yu, Haiqing. “Dwelling Narrowness: Chinese Media and Their Disingenuous Neoliberal Logic.” Continuum 25.1 (2011): 33–46. Yan, Yunxiang. Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Zheng, Tiantian. Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Unconventional energy sources have become increasingly important to the global energy mix. These include coal seam gas, shale gas and shale oil. The unconventional gas industry was pioneered in the United States and embraced following the first oil shock in 1973 (Rogers). As has been the case with many global resources (Hiscock), many of the same companies that worked in the USA carried their experience in this industry to early Australian explorations. Recently the USA has secured significant energy security with the development of unconventional energy deposits such as the Marcellus shale gas and the Bakken shale oil (Dobb; McGraw). But this has not come without environmental impact, including contamination to underground water supply (Osborn, Vengosh, Warner, Jackson) and potential greenhouse gas contributions (Howarth, Santoro, Ingraffea; McKenna). The environmental impact of unconventional gas extraction has raised serious public concern about the introduction and growth of the industry in Australia. In coal rich Australia coal seam gas is currently the major source of unconventional gas. Large gas deposits have been found in prime agricultural land along eastern Australia, such as the Liverpool Plains in New South Wales and the Darling Downs in Queensland. Competing land-uses and a series of environmental incidents from the coal seam gas industry have warranted major protest from a coalition of environmentalists and farmers (Berry; McLeish). Conflict between energy companies wanting development and environmentalists warning precaution is an easy script to cast for frontline media coverage. But historical perspectives are often missing in these contemporary debates. While coal mining and natural gas have often received “boosting” historical coverage (Diamond; Wilkinson), and although historical themes of “development” and “rushes” remain predominant when observing the span of the industry (AGA; Blainey), the history of unconventional gas, particularly the history of its environmental impact, has been little studied. Few people are aware, for example, that the first shale gas exploratory well was completed in late 2010 in the Cooper Basin in Central Australia (Molan) and is considered as a “new” frontier in Australian unconventional gas. Moreover many people are unaware that the first coal seam gas wells were completed in 1976 in Queensland. The first four wells offer an important moment for reflection in light of the industry’s recent move into Central Australia. By locating and analysing the first four coal seam gas wells, this essay identifies the roots of the unconventional gas industry in Australia and explores the early environmental impact of these wells. By analysing exploration reports that have been placed online by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines through the lens of environmental history, the dominant developmental narrative of this industry can also be scrutinised. These narratives often place more significance on economic and national benefits while displacing the environmental and social impacts of the industry (Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman, Albrecht; Duus; McEachern; Trigger). This essay therefore seeks to bring an environmental insight into early unconventional gas mining in Australia. As the author, I am concerned that nearly four decades on and it seems that no one has heeded the warning gleaned from these early wells and early exploration reports, as gas exploration in Australia continues under little scrutiny. Arrival The first four unconventional gas wells in Australia appear at the beginning of the industry world-wide (Schraufnagel, McBane, and Kuuskraa; McClanahan). The wells were explored by Houston Oils and Minerals—a company that entered the Australian mining scene by sharing a mining prospect with International Australian Energy Company (Wiltshire). The International Australian Energy Company was owned by Black Giant Oil Company in the US, which in turn was owned by International Royalty and Oil Company also based in the US. The Texan oilman Robert Kanton held a sixteen percent share in the latter. Kanton had an idea that the Mimosa Syncline in the south-eastern Bowen Basin was a gas trap waiting to be exploited. To test the theory he needed capital. Kanton presented the idea to Houston Oil and Minerals which had the financial backing to take the risk. Shotover No. 1 was drilled by Houston Oil and Minerals thirty miles south-east of the coal mining town of Blackwater. By late August 1975 it was drilled to 2,717 metres, discovered to have little gas, spudded, and, after a spend of $610,000, abandoned. The data from the Shotover well showed that the porosity of the rocks in the area was not a trap, and the Mimosa Syncline was therefore downgraded as a possible hydrocarbon location. There was, however, a small amount of gas found in the coal seams (Benbow 16). The well had passed through the huge coal seams of both the Bowen and Surat basins—important basins for the future of both the coal and gas industries. Mining Concepts In 1975, while Houston Oil and Minerals was drilling the Shotover well, US Steel and the US Bureau of Mines used hydraulic fracture, a technique already used in the petroleum industry, to drill vertical surface wells to drain gas from a coal seam (Methane Drainage Taskforce 102). They were able to remove gas from the coal seam before it was mined and sold enough to make a profit. With the well data from the Shotover well in Australia compiled, Houston returned to the US to research the possibility of harvesting methane in Australia. As the company saw it, methane drainage was “a novel exploitation concept” and the methane in the Bowen Basin was an “enormous hydrocarbon resource” (Wiltshire 7). The Shotover well passed through a section of the German Creek Coal measures and this became their next target. In September 1976 the Shotover well was re-opened and plugged at 1499 meters to become Australia’s first exploratory unconventional gas well. By the end of the month the rig was released and gas production tested. At one point an employee on the drilling operation observed a gas flame “the size of a 44 gal drum” (HOMA, “Shotover # 1” 9). But apart from the brief show, no gas flowed. And yet, Houston Oil and Minerals was not deterred, as they had already taken out other leases for further prospecting (Wiltshire 4). Only a week after the Shotover well had failed, Houston moved the methane search south-east to an area five miles north of the Moura township. Houston Oil and Minerals had researched the coal exploration seismic surveys of the area that were conducted in 1969, 1972, and 1973 to choose the location. Over the next two months in late 1976, two new wells—Kinma No.1 and Carra No.1—were drilled within a mile from each other and completed as gas wells. Houston Oil and Minerals also purchased the old oil exploration well Moura No. 1 from the Queensland Government and completed it as a suspended gas well. The company must have mined the Department of Mines archive to find Moura No.1, as the previous exploration report from 1969 noted methane given off from the coal seams (Sell). By December 1976 Houston Oil and Minerals had three gas wells in the vicinity of each other and by early 1977 testing had occurred. The results were disappointing with minimal gas flow at Kinma and Carra, but Moura showed a little more promise. Here, the drillers were able to convert their Fairbanks-Morse engine driving the pump from an engine run on LPG to one run on methane produced from the well (Porter, “Moura # 1”). Drink This? Although there was not much gas to find in the test production phase, there was a lot of water. The exploration reports produced by the company are incomplete (indeed no report was available for the Shotover well), but the information available shows that a large amount of water was extracted before gas started to flow (Porter, “Carra # 1”; Porter, “Moura # 1”; Porter, “Kinma # 1”). As Porter’s reports outline, prior to gas flowing, the water produced at Carra, Kinma and Moura totalled 37,600 litres, 11,900 and 2,900 respectively. It should be noted that the method used to test the amount of water was not continuous and these amounts were not the full amount of water produced; also, upon gas coming to the surface some of the wells continued to produce water. In short, before any gas flowed at the first unconventional gas wells in Australia at least 50,000 litres of water were taken from underground. Results show that the water was not ready to drink (Mathers, “Moura # 1”; Mathers, “Appendix 1”; HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 21-24). The water had total dissolved solids (minerals) well over the average set by the authorities (WHO; Apps Laboratories; NHMRC; QDAFF). The well at Kinma recorded the highest levels, almost two and a half times the unacceptable standard. On average the water from the Moura well was of reasonable standard, possibly because some water was extracted from the well when it was originally sunk in 1969; but the water from Kinma and Carra was very poor quality, not good enough for crops, stock or to be let run into creeks. The biggest issue was the sodium concentration; all wells had very high salt levels. Kinma and Carra were four and two times the maximum standard respectively. In short, there was a substantial amount of poor quality water produced from drilling and testing the three wells. Fracking Australia Hydraulic fracturing is an artificial process that can encourage more gas to flow to the surface (McGraw; Fischetti; Senate). Prior to the testing phase at the Moura field, well data was sent to the Chemical Research and Development Department at Halliburton in Oklahoma, to examine the ability to fracture the coal and shale in the Australian wells. Halliburton was the founding father of hydraulic fracture. In Oklahoma on 17 March 1949, operating under an exclusive license from Standard Oil, this company conducted the first ever hydraulic fracture of an oil well (Montgomery and Smith). To come up with a program of hydraulic fracturing for the Australian field, Halliburton went back to the laboratory. They bonded together small slabs of coal and shale similar to Australian samples, drilled one-inch holes into the sample, then pressurised the holes and completed a “hydro-frac” in miniature. “These samples were difficult to prepare,” they wrote in their report to Houston Oil and Minerals (HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 10). Their program for fracturing was informed by a field of science that had been evolving since the first hydraulic fracture but had rapidly progressed since the first oil shock. Halliburton’s laboratory test had confirmed that the model of Perkins and Kern developed for widths of hydraulic fracture—in an article that defined the field—should also apply to Australian coals (Perkins and Kern). By late January 1977 Halliburton had issued Houston Oil and Minerals with a program of hydraulic fracture to use on the central Queensland wells. On the final page of their report they warned: “There are many unknowns in a vertical fracture design procedure” (HOMA, “Miscellaneous Pages” 17). In July 1977, Moura No. 1 became the first coal seam gas well hydraulically fractured in Australia. The exploration report states: “During July 1977 the well was killed with 1% KCL solution and the tubing and packer were pulled from the well … and pumping commenced” (Porter 2-3). The use of the word “kill” is interesting—potassium chloride (KCl) is the third and final drug administered in the lethal injection of humans on death row in the USA. Potassium chloride was used to minimise the effect on parts of the coal seam that were water-sensitive and was the recommended solution prior to adding other chemicals (Montgomery and Smith 28); but a word such as “kill” also implies that the well and the larger environment were alive before fracking commenced (Giblett; Trigger). Pumping recommenced after the fracturing fluid was unloaded. Initially gas supply was very good. It increased from an average estimate of 7,000 cubic feet per day to 30,000, but this only lasted two days before coal and sand started flowing back up to the surface. In effect, the cleats were propped open but the coal did not close and hold onto them which meant coal particles and sand flowed back up the pipe with diminishing amounts of gas (Walters 12). Although there were some interesting results, the program was considered a failure. In April 1978, Houston Oil and Minerals finally abandoned the methane concept. Following the failure, they reflected on the possibilities for a coal seam gas industry given the gas prices in Queensland: “Methane drainage wells appear to offer no economic potential” (Wooldridge 2). At the wells they let the tubing drop into the hole, put a fifteen foot cement plug at the top of the hole, covered it with a steel plate and by their own description restored the area to its “original state” (Wiltshire 8). Houston Oil and Minerals now turned to “conventional targets” which included coal exploration (Wiltshire 7). A Thousand Memories The first four wells show some of the critical environmental issues that were present from the outset of the industry in Australia. The process of hydraulic fracture was not just a failure, but conducted on a science that had never been tested in Australia, was ponderous at best, and by Halliburton’s own admission had “many unknowns”. There was also the role of large multinationals providing “experience” (Briody; Hiscock) and conducting these tests while having limited knowledge of the Australian landscape. Before any gas came to the surface, a large amount of water was produced that was loaded with a mixture of salt and other heavy minerals. The source of water for both the mud drilling of Carra and Kinma, as well as the hydraulic fracture job on Moura, was extracted from Kianga Creek three miles from the site (HOMA, “Carra # 1” 5; HOMA, “Kinma # 1” 5; Porter, “Moura # 1”). No location was listed for the disposal of the water from the wells, including the hydraulic fracture liquid. Considering the poor quality of water, if the water was disposed on site or let drain into a creek, this would have had significant environmental impact. Nobody has yet answered the question of where all this water went. The environmental issues of water extraction, saline water and hydraulic fracture were present at the first four wells. At the first four wells environmental concern was not a priority. The complexity of inter-company relations, as witnessed at the Shotover well, shows there was little time. The re-use of old wells, such as the Moura well, also shows that economic priorities were more important. Even if environmental information was considered important at the time, no one would have had access to it because, as handwritten notes on some of the reports show, many of the reports were “confidential” (Sell). Even though coal mines commenced filing Environmental Impact Statements in the early 1970s, there is no such documentation for gas exploration conducted by Houston Oil and Minerals. A lack of broader awareness for the surrounding environment, from floral and faunal health to the impact on habitat quality, can be gleaned when reading across all the exploration reports. Nearly four decades on and we now have thousands of wells throughout the world. Yet, the challenges of unconventional gas still persist. The implications of the environmental history of the first four wells in Australia for contemporary unconventional gas exploration and development in this country and beyond are significant. Many environmental issues were present from the beginning of the coal seam gas industry in Australia. Owning up to this history would place policy makers and regulators in a position to strengthen current regulation. The industry continues to face the same challenges today as it did at the start of development—including water extraction, hydraulic fracturing and problems associated with drilling through underground aquifers. Looking more broadly at the unconventional gas industry, shale gas has appeared as the next target for energy resources in Australia. Reflecting on the first exploratory shale gas wells drilled in Central Australia, the chief executive of the company responsible for the shale gas wells noted their deliberate decision to locate their activities in semi-desert country away from “an area of prime agricultural land” and conflict with environmentalists (quoted in Molan). Moreover, the journalist Paul Cleary recently complained about the coal seam gas industry polluting Australia’s food-bowl but concluded that the “next frontier” should be in “remote” Central Australia with shale gas (Cleary 195). It appears that preference is to move the industry to the arid centre of Australia, to the ecologically and culturally unique Lake Eyre Basin region (Robin and Smith). Claims to move the industry away from areas that might have close public scrutiny disregard many groups in the Lake Eyre Basin, such as Aboriginal rights to land, and appear similar to other industrial projects that disregard local inhabitants, such as mega-dams and nuclear testing (Nixon). References AGA (Australian Gas Association). “Coal Seam Methane in Australia: An Overview.” AGA Research Paper 2 (1996). Apps Laboratories. “What Do Your Water Test Results Mean?” Apps Laboratories 7 Sept. 2012. 1 May 2013 ‹http://appslabs.com.au/downloads.htm›. Benbow, Dennis B. “Shotover No. 1: Lithology Report for Houston Oil and Minerals Corporation.” November 1975. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 5457_2. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines 4 June 2012. 1 May 2013 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=5457&COLLECTION_ID=999›. Berry, Petrina. “Qld Minister Refuses to Drink CSG Water.” news.com.au, 22 Apr. 2013. 1 May 2013 ‹http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/qld-minister-refuses-to-drink-csg-water/story-e6frfku9-1226626115742›. Blainey, Geofrey. The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining. Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2003. Briody, Dan. The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money. Singapore: Wiley, 2004. Cleary, Paul. Mine-Field: The Dark Side of Australia’s Resource Rush. Collingwood: Black Inc., 2012. Connor, Linda, Nick Higginbotham, Sonia Freeman, and Glenn Albrecht. “Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley, New South Wales.” Oceania 78.1 (2008): 76-90. Diamond, Marion. “Coal in Australian History.” Coal and the Commonwealth: The Greatness of an Australian Resource. Eds. Peter Knights and Michael Hood. St Lucia: University of Queensland, 2009. 23-45. 20 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.peabodyenergy.com/mm/files/News/Publications/Special%20Reports/coal_and_commonwealth%5B1%5D.pdf›. Dobb, Edwin. “The New Oil Landscape.” National Geographic (Mar. 2013): 29-59. Duus, Sonia. “Coal Contestations: Learning from a Long, Broad View.” Rural Society Journal 22.2 (2013): 96-110. Fischetti, Mark. “The Drillers Are Coming.” Scientific American (July 2010): 82-85. Giblett, Rod. “Terrifying Prospects and Resources of Hope: Minescapes, Timescapes and the Aesthetics of the Future.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23.6 (2009): 781-789. Hiscock, Geoff. Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources. Singapore: Wiley, 2012. HOMA (Houston Oil and Minerals of Australia). “Carra # 1: Well Completion Report.” July 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6054_1. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6054&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Kinma # 1: Well Completion Report.” August 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_2. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6190&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Miscellaneous Pages. Including Hydro-Frac Report.” August 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_17. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 31 May 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6190&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Shotover # 1: Well Completion Report.” March 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 5457_1. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 22 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=5457&COLLECTION_ID=999›. Howarth, Robert W., Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea. “Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas from Shale Formations: A Letter.” Climatic Change 106.4 (2011): 679-690. Mathers, D. “Appendix 1: Water Analysis.” 1-2 August 1977. Brisbane: Government Chemical Laboratory. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6054_4. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6054&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Moura # 1: Testing Report Appendix D Fluid Analyses.” 2 Aug. 1977. Brisbane: Government Chemical Laboratory. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 5991_5. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 22 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=5991&COLLECTION_ID=999›. McClanahan, Elizabeth A. “Coalbed Methane: Myths, Facts, and Legends of Its History and the Legislative and Regulatory Climate into the 21st Century.” Oklahoma Law Review 48.3 (1995): 471-562. McEachern, Doug. “Mining Meaning from the Rhetoric of Nature—Australian Mining Companies and Their Attitudes to the Environment at Home and Abroad.” Policy Organisation and Society (1995): 48-69. McGraw, Seamus. The End of Country. New York: Random House, 2011. McKenna, Phil. “Uprising.” Matter 21 Feb. 2013. 1 Mar. 2013 ‹https://www.readmatter.com/a/uprising/›.McLeish, Kathy. “Farmers to March against Coal Seam Gas.” ABC News 27 Apr. 2012. 22 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-27/farmers-to-march-against-coal-seam-gas/3977394›. Methane Drainage Taskforce. Coal Seam Methane. Sydney: N.S.W. Department of Mineral Resources and Office of Energy, 1992. Molan, Lauren. “A New Shift in the Global Energy Scene: Australian Shale.” Gas Today Online. 4 Nov. 2011. 3 May 2012 ‹http://gastoday.com.au/news/a_new_shift_in_the_global_energy_scene_australian_shale/064568/›. Montgomery, Carl T., and Michael B. Smith. “Hydraulic Fracturing: History of an Enduring Technology.” Journal of Petroleum Technology (2010): 26-32. 30 May 2012 ‹http://www.spe.org/jpt/print/archives/2010/12/10Hydraulic.pdf›. NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council). National Water Quality Management Strategy: Australian Drinking Water Guidelines 6. Canberra: Australian Government, 2004. 7 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/guidelines/publications/eh52›. Nixon, Rob. “Unimagined Communities: Developmental Refugees, Megadams and Monumental Modernity.” New Formations 69 (2010): 62-80. Osborn, Stephen G., Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel R. Warner, and Robert B. Jackson. “Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.20 (2011): 8172-8176. Perkins, T.K., and L.R. Kern. “Widths of Hydraulic Fractures.” Journal of Petroleum Technology 13.9 (1961): 937-949. Porter, Seton M. “Carra # 1:Testing Report, Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures, A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” Oct. 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6054_7. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6054&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Kinma # 1: Testing Report, Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures, A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” Oct. 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_16. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6190&COLLECTION_ID=999›. ———. “Moura # 1: Testing Report: Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures: A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” Oct. 1977. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_15. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6190&COLLECTION_ID=999›. QDAFF (Queensland Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry). “Interpreting Water Analysis for Crop and Pasture.” 1 Aug. 2012. 1 May 2013 ‹http://www.daff.qld.gov.au/ 26_4347.htm›. Robin, Libby, and Mike Smith. “Prologue.” Desert Channels: The Impulse To Conserve. Eds. Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2010. XIII-XVII. Rogers, Rudy E. Coalbed Methane: Principles and Practice. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hill, 1994. Sell, B.H. “T.E.P.L. Moura No.1 Well Completion Report.” October 1969. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 2899_1. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 26 Feb. 2013 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=2899&COLLECTION_ID=999›. Senate. Management of the Murray Darling Basin: Interim Report: The Impact of Coal Seam Gas on the Management of the Murray Darling Basin. Canberra: Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee, 2011. Schraufnagel, Richard, Richard McBane, and Vello Kuuskraa. “Coalbed Methane Development Faces Technology Gaps.” Oil & Gas Journal 88.6 (1990): 48-54. Trigger, David. “Mining, Landscape and the Culture of Development Ideology in Australia.” Ecumene 4 (1997): 161-180. Walters, Ronald L. Letter to Dennis Benbow. 29 August 1977. In Seton M. Porter, “Moura # 1: Testing Report: Methane Drainage of the Baralaba Coal Measures: A.T.P. 226P, Central Queensland, Australia.” October 1977, 11-14. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports. Company Report 6190_15. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6190&COLLECTION_ID=999›. WHO (World Health Organization). International Standards for Drinking-Water. 3rd Ed. Geneva, 1971. Wilkinson, Rick. A Thirst for Burning: The Story of Australia's Oil Industry. Sydney: David Ell Press, 1983. Wiltshire, M.J. “A Review to ATP 233P, 231P (210P) – Bowen/Surat Basins, Queensland for Houston Oil Minerals Australia, Inc.” 19 Jan. 1979. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports Database. Company Report 6816. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 21 Feb. 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6816&COLLECTION_ID=999›. Wooldridge, L.C.P. “Methane Drainage in the Bowen Basin – Queensland.” 25 Aug. 1978. Queensland Digital Exploration Reports Database. Company Report 6626_1. Brisbane: Queensland Department of Resources and Mines. 31 May 2012 ‹https://qdexguest.deedi.qld.gov.au/portal/site/qdex/search?REPORT_ID=6626&COLLECTION_ID=999›.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. Over 41 years ago, in the legal geography that was Nimbin, New South Wales, the imaginings of property escaped the conformity of enclosure. The Aquarian age represented a moment in “thickened time” (Braverman et al 53), when dissenting theory became practice, and the idea of property indelibly changed for a handful of serendipitous actors, the unscripted performers of a countercultural narrative faithful to its time and place. References Alexander, Gregory. Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Aquarian Archives. "Report into Facilitation of a Rural Intentional Community." Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Blomley, Nicholas. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press, 1994. Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge, 2004. Blomley, Nicholas. “Performing Property, Making the World.” Social Studies Research Network 2053656. 5 Aug. 2013 ‹http://ssrn.com/abstract=2053656›. Braverman, Irus, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar. The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Buck, Andrew. The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney: Federation Press, 2006. Cock, Peter. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1979. Cohen, Felix. “Dialogue on Private Property.” Rutgers Law Review 9 (1954): 357-387. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Beginning Rather than an End.” The Nimbin Good Times 27 Mar. 1973: 1. Farran, Sue. “Earth under the Nails: The Extraordinary Return to the Land.” Modern Studies in Property Law. Ed. Nicholas Hopkins. 7th edition. Oxford: Hart, 2013. 173-191. Graham, Nicole. Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Tim, and Ian Baker. A Hard Won Freedom: Alternative Communities in New Zealand. Auckland: Hodder & Staughton, 1975. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Lismore Regional Gallery. “Not Quite Square: The Story of Northern Rivers Architecture.” Exhibition, 13 Apr. to 2 June 2013. McLaren, John. “The Canadian Doukhobors and the Land Question: Religious Communalists in a Fee Simple World.” Land and Freedom: Law Property Rights and the British Diaspora. Eds. Andrew Buck, John McLaren and Nancy Wright. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. 135-168. Metcalf, Bill. Co-operative Lifestyles in Australia: From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995. Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Page, John. “Common Property and the Age of Aquarius.” Griffith Law Review 19 (2010): 172-196. Page, John, Ann Brower, and Johannes Welsh. “The Curious Untidiness of Property and Ecosystem Services: A Hybrid Method of Measuring Place.” Pace Environmental Law Rev. 32 (2015): forthcoming. Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73 (1964): 733-787. Richmond River Historical Society Archives. “After Nimbin What?” Nimbin Aquarius file, flyer. Lismore, NSW. Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Rose, Carol M. “The Several Futures of Property: Of Cyberspace and Folk Tales, Emission Trades and Ecosystems.” Minnesota Law Rev. 83 (1998-1999): 129-182. Rose, Carol M. “Canons of Property Talk, or Blackstone’s Anxiety.” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 601-632. Sargisson, Lucy, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Sax, Joseph L. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Singer, Joseph. “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property.” Nw. U.L.Rev. 90 (1995): 1283-1481. Smith, Margaret, and David Crossley, eds. The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1975. Stone, Christopher. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450-501. Tribe, Laurence H. “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law.” Yale Law Journal 83 (1973-1974): 1315-1348. Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York: Free Press, 1980.

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like SlutWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.